They're dead Ducks

ANAHEIM – The miraculous third-period comeback wasn't there this time. The last-minute drama was all too brief. Any shred of hope that an overflow Honda Center crowd kept quickly dissipated.

Game 7 is ideally supposed to reveal a hero or some theatrics that are talked about for years, maybe decades. All the Detroit Red Wings did was systematically ship the Ducks into their offseason earlier than they anticipated.

Justin Abdelkader and Valtteri Filppula broke the decisive contest open as the Red Wings held on for a 3-2 victory and ousted the Ducks for an anticlimactic finish to a thrill-packed Western Conference first-round series.

The Ducks couldn't eliminate the Red Wings when they had the chance in Game 6 and then came up with a substandard effort that will sit with them all summer.

"We all came to the rink very confident in ourselves," winger Bobby Ryan said in a library-quiet locker room. "Very excited about where this could take us. It's a pretty low morale group right now, that's for sure."

The Ducks never led and they strangely looked disengaged for a long while after Filppula's second-period goal made it 3-1. But the turning point came from Abdelkader, who returned from a two-game suspension in Game 6 for his hit on Toni Lydman.

Abdelkader picked off an errant pass by Ducks defenseman Francois Beauchemin and went in on a breakaway, slipping a puck between the pads of goalie Jonas Hiller for a shorthanded score and a 2-1 lead. Rookie Emerson Etem had given the Ducks momentum with a tying goal.

Henrik Zetterberg put the Ducks on the defensive from outset as he put in a rebound past Hiller for a 1-0 lead just 1:49 into the game.

Beauchemin made it interesting when his backhand pass toward the crease hit Detroit defenseman Jonathan Ericsson and slipped in behind goalie Jimmy Howard with 3:17 left. But Howard made 31 saves, again playing well as he had all series.

Ducks defenseman Ben Lovejoy called it a “terrible feeling.”

“It sucks,” Lovejoy said. “I feel like, as a team, we let ourselves down. They were the better team tonight. They outplayed us from the start and we had to battle to hang in there with them.

“We didn’t give ourselves a real chance to win. We tried at the end. We tried to make a push. We weren’t good enough all night.”